The Challenges

While the business challenges associated with rapid growth are many, there are four primary obstacles that cannabis producers seek to solve through the strategic implementation of new technology and targeted process improvements.

Meeting Rising Regulations

As more states legalize marijuana use, growers and producers must uphold government compliance standards for use and quality across operational sites, both during the production process and during distribution. At the same time, they must also meticulously document tax liabilities, and manage medicinal versus recreational product lines. As compliance requirements continue to proliferate, cannabis businesses are challenged to juggle all of the applicable laws and regulations in a way that is not operationally burdensome or cost prohibitive.

Managing Quality from Seed to Scale

Many family-owned producers have long been known for their high-quality products. As their businesses grow, however, producers have been forced to adopt more technologically-driven production processes, leveraging automation at every stage—beginning in the field. What used to be a meticulously controlled process stewarded by a few trusted hands is now an automated assembly line that challenges companies to maintain the same level of quality assurance.

Scaling Production to Meet Demand

While technological automation has helped cannabis businesses to scale, they still struggle with new operational realities. Specifically, year-round demand has forced growers to overcome barriers associated with seasonality, adopting alternate farming practices during the non-peak growing season. As production continues to scale, growers and producers must maintain real-time visibility while managing their increasingly complex production processes.

Providing Consumers Peace of Mind

Finally, while legalization led to a proliferation of licensed producers, cannabis businesses still face a wave of consumer uncertainty. As bad actors and ill-equipped growers continue to make the headlines for contaminated or unsafe product, many distributors and end users are skeptical of the source. As cannabis businesses scale their operations from local to national, they must win the trust of a broader set of consumers than ever before.

The Solution

For nearly a century, Ashton Potter has served compliance-driven businesses around the world. Today, we own the entire supply chain security process from stem to stern—ranging from the tamper-proof label, to the product security technology to the data management system—and leverage partnerships with our Gold Integration Partners to cost-effectively augment and extend existing enterprise systems and processes.

Serialization from Seed to Scale

Beyond that which a traditional MES solution provides, Ashton Potter lays the groundwork for total traceability through tamper-proof labeling solutions that assign unique, serialized identities to each plant, item, and batch. Drawing upon years of experience in the security printing space, Ashton Potter layers multiple advanced anti-counterfeiting printing techniques together, empowering cannabis producers to thwart illicit attempts to corrupt or divert product throughout the supply chain. Highly scalable to billions of records, Ashton Potter provides growers the ability to produce labels off-site at a secured facility or on-site in the convenience of their own production facilities.

Universal Traceability & Control

Ashton Potter pairs its serialized labels with ProLinc®, an advanced technology solution that provides comprehensive, tamper-proof records at every stage of the cannabis lifecycle—from seed, to cultivation, harvesting, drying, distribution, and beyond.

In addition to enabling growers and producers to uphold product quality and safety through comprehensive traceability and verification, ProLinc also serves as a dynamic manufacturing execution system for cannabis producers to manage growing, processing, and packaging processes as they scale. By unleashing relevant process data in real time, ProLinc enables producers with cannabis track and trace technology to replicate best practices that increase production yield and profitability—whether they have a single site with 100 acres, or multiple sites with 100,000.

As an extension of its core cannabis MES functionality, ProLinc also provides automated compliance reporting and tax liability management that virtually eliminates the operational burden associated with the manual management of growing regulations. SaaS-based and Blockchain-enabled, ProLinc leverages a secure VPN network to provide key users within the production facility, distributors, and end users access to a single, incorruptible record of product-associated data.

Integration Services & Process Optimization

As a proven partner with specialized knowledge of compliance-driven industries, Ashton Potter augments its technology and labeling solutions with a suite of services that set cannabis customers up for successful implementation and rapid time-to-ROI. Working with a vast network of integration partners, Ashton Potter provides end-to-end cannabis compliance management, process optimization, on-site and remote training services, and integration with producers’ business intelligence tools of choice.